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Libya was a "pick your poison" scenario, in which the options were to exempt Qaddafi from the "world police" treatment for atrocities (I don't recall the details of what the inciting incident was - some anti-dissident thing gone too far), because he had relinquished WMDs and it would send a bad message to rogue states, or to treat Qaddafi like any other dictator without WMDs. If anyone knows whether threading the needle on that one was possible (i.e., prevent further mass-murder by Qaddafi without getting Qaddafi overthrown), they probably aren't a Motte commenter, but it wasn't an arbitrary about-face on Libya or (to the best of my knowledge) done with regime change as a terminal goal.
The USA did, and still does, nothing about Sudan except some toothless sanctions.
Is Sudan as geopolitically important as Libya was?
Somalia sure is and we let that be a shitshow which sometimes has a government. Yemen combines the strategic importance with the government backed human rights abuses and, well…
My understanding that Somalia's primary effect on the West is that its coast needs to be avoided. Yemen policy is inextricable from Iran policy. Syria is the closest parallel I can think of.
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The US could have told the Europeans to more firmly eat shit when they suggested intervening, and it likely would have proceeded in the same way that many other African insurrections have, i.e. it would be over quickly... or maybe it wouldn't, but in either case it wouldn't be our problem. Unless of course it became another power-vacuum that allowed a proto-ISIS to rise. In any case the US was probably more deferential to European calls to intervene given how they helped the US to some extent in its wars in Afghanistan + Iraq, and there were a lot of people wondering if NATO had any purpose any more, so they probably hoped to kill multiple birds with one stone and ensure NATO didn't look like "all for me, none for thee".
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After the Iraq affair and 15 years of State department media psyops, I don't trust a damned thing they say anymore and don't see why I should believe that Qadaffi did these alleged atrocities
Especially given that digging into the Lockerbie bombing shows a lot of weird stuff as to the provenance of the attack.
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Qaddafi was fighting an armed rebellion, something he had done a few times before. My recollection is that he was winning that fight pretty handily as well, that it was not a terribly bloody victory, and that his previous victories over armed rebellions had not been terribly bloody either; based on prior behavior, he would have executed or imprisoned the rebel leadership, and then things would go on more or less as before. The three-way civil war that resulted from our intervention likely resulted in bloodshed roughly an order of magnitude worse than what would have resulted had we just let things play out. At least, that's my understanding; I invite correction from those who know better.
I don't think it was so much about the amount of domestic bloodshed with Qadafi versus some unknown quantity. We had already been through Iraq and Afghanistan and weren't naive about what a power vacuum could look like. The problem was that it was a volatile time in the Middle East due to Arab Spring, and Qadafi had a history of sending troops into nearby countries and destabilizing them so as to get his own mini-sphere of influence. It was bad enough when he did it in places like Chad or Niger, but the possibility of something similar happening in Egypt was probably more than Western governments were willing to tolerate. This is all speculation on my part, but it wouldn't surprise me if the State Department wasn't adamant about this narrative when it came to selling the operation to the American public, because a history lesson involving the complex histories of countries they've never heard of combined with hypotheticals doesn't pack quite the same punch as "there will be civilian reprisals if he regains power".
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Libya was already in what could only be classified as a fullblown civil war well before the French pushed NATO to intervene. The country had already functionally split in half, with pitched battles between the rebels and state forces.
My recollection is that the rebels were losing ground pretty steadily, and fear of Qaddafi committing massacres once he broke the rebel forces was used to sell intervention to the public. That was how it was sold to me, in any case.
Yes. And then the mandate of 'intervene to stop the advance to prevent a massacre' was reasoned into 'and then reverse the advance in the other direction.'
And so one of the only people in history to actively give up a WMD program under external threat ended up ensuring that they would be one of the only people in history to give up a WMD program under external threat. WMD non-proliferation had a terrible setback that year, but at least Hillary got a quippy one-liner and bolstered her tough-on-national-security reputation.
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Yeah, that's approximately correct.
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